Touchscreen computers, also called touchpads, like the iPad® by Apple Inc., are becoming common. A key technology that has driven their acceptance is the touchscreen. This input mechanism has many useful features, such as the ability to pinch fingers to zoom, scroll, and allow multi-finger typing. However, touchpads do not respond well to stylus or finger input, as touchscreens require a fairly broad conductive contact with the touchscreen to detect position or motion.
In addition, most touchscreens utilize heavy filtering algorithms and relatively low sampling rates, making them very limited in their usefulness for forensically authenticable signature capture, which has become and continues to be an important element of and feature for doing business on portable computing devices.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a better sensing mechanism for use in capturing forensically authenticable signatures in touchpads.